Gas burners are commonly used on the cooktops of household gas cooking appliances including e.g., range ovens and cooktops built into cabinetry. For example, gas cooktops traditionally have at least one gas burner positioned at a cooktop surface for use in heating or cooking an object, such as a cooking utensil and its contents. Control knobs are typically used to adjust the power level of the heating element, e.g., the amount of fuel directed to the burner, and thus the amount of heat delivered by the gas burner.
Normally aspirated gas burners rely on the energy available in the form of pressure from the fuel supplied to the gas burner to entrain air for combustion. Because the nominal pressure in households is relatively low, there is a practical limit to the amount of primary air a normally aspirated gas burner can entrain. Introducing a fan or another forced air supply into a gas burner assembly may improve the mixture of fuel and air for improved operation at higher outputs, with shorter flames and improved stability, and with improved efficiency. Forced air burners often use tall, narrow, and closely spaced burner ports to minimize the burner footprint and flame lengths, thereby improving heat transfer efficiency.
However, commonly used methods of manufacturing burner heads have limited ability to accommodate such high aspect ratio burner ports. For example, when die casting a burner head, the dies used to produce the burner ports would have very thin walls and would lack the strength and wear properties to withstand the stresses of injecting molten metals. Similarly, forging methods would require dies having long, thin projections too fragile to form the high aspect ratio burner ports.
Accordingly, an improved gas burner assembly is desirable. More particularly, a gas burner assembly including an easily manufactured forced air burner having tall, narrow burner ports would be particularly beneficial.